Yesterday, Jailbreak Nation highlighted a bug with iOS 6.1 that allows users to bypass a passcode lock on an iPhone to access the phone function and contacts on the device. While the bug allows only limited access to the device and can require several attempts to achieve the correct timing to exploit, it is gaining significant attention today.

Having this kind of bug in the OS is certainly not good and Apple needs to fix it ASAP. I still don’t understand how do people figure this stuff out?

The point is no one talks about Android security because Android has no security. The only reason an exploit makes the news regarding Apple is because Apple is actually working on making their OSes secure.

And we won’t bother to go into the fact that security bug counts are a meaningless metric.

Yeah, right. That’s a gross oversimplification. Many of the issues people point out on Android, normal users would never run across: side loading malware, turning on debugging/tweak certain settings then plugging into a computer to run an app that messes w/ your computer, etc.

Techpm

Those are all valid ways, but too hard. In fact you only need to get close to an Android phone to hack into it:

Yeah a purposely crafted backdoor is what I’m starting to seriously consider now this has happened a second time. Whether it’s a disgruntled developer or not I don’t know. And we have no clues since we can’t look at the code and establish how easy it should have been to spot in peer review.

Steven Fisher

No, I doubt it. If the lock screen is not the root UI process — which it clearly isn’t — causing a crash will cause this to happen. It becomes a matter of finding a way to crash it or something it launches. Crashes are usually not hard to find.

tyr

Interestingly, a bug I had in 6.0 did just that: unlocking the screen sometimes left me with an unresponsive phone displaying the same screen while background processes still worked, incoming calls, camera, etc. Fixing that bug may be what caused this regression.